How to ‘cheat’ the ‘cheat day’

We are only human with so much willpower.

Ever wake up sometimes and you’ve gone from diet to cheat day real quick. I mean things have been going well, you’ve been leaning down, tracking everything. You’ve had no cravings because you’ve been smart about incorporating the foods you like, by all means, you’d even stretch it to being ‘perfect’.

But…

One morning you wake up, you’re not hungry but you feel like jumping those steps to the fridge because you remembered that tub of Ben & Jerry’s you stashed at the bottom of the freezer the other week. Everything is screaming at you to binge and you don’t know why?

We’ve all been there.

The worst is when it happens late at night after you’ve eaten all your calories for the day and you can’t sleep. The water you’ve been sipping on isn’t helping, neither is the pepsi max cherry you have; the usual distractions do nothing.

And then it happens. All of a sudden in a space of 3 minutes you’re up, dressed and in the car eagerly anticipating getting into any superstore that has everything – sound like you?

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I know them feels brother. You don’t even massively want to cheat, because your low weigh in day is tomorrow; the water weight; the toxic gas chamber you are going to unleash in your toilet that no amount of air freshener can mask and not to mention having to wait another week to see your weight drop.

Long…

But again, it happens to the best of us…

I have drawn up a strategy to help you deal with this.

1.First and foremost still try to push your first meal as late as possible. Find things to do. Keep busy.

Start your day with junk food. Whenever I feel like having a cheat day I usually start my day off with low calorie chocolates, sweets, ice cream (or whatever you are craving) so that if I do find I don’t want to cheat anymore, I still have tons of calories left over!

Have a big meal of junk but still hit your caloric budget. An effective strategy I found was to eat belgian chocolate frozen greek yogurt!

I marched to asda and bought three of them, £2.00 each and it only has 420 Kcal per tub. So in total I had consumed 1260 calories, each tub has 20g of protein. After I had got through them, I was stuffed and as a bonus, I had gotten 60g of protein.

As a bonus, I still had 600 kcal left over to hit the rest of my protein. I get that with chocolate whey protein, greek yogurt, fruit, muesli and some honey.

By the end of the night, I have hit my deficit and I no longer have the urge to binge. I have found this strategy to be most effective. Effectively binge using your caloric budget, as a result you will continue to lean down, psychologically you feel great, it’s fun and it’s fresh.

It’s important to understand that sometimes going off the plan is ok. If you do end up binging, don’t think about it after, don’t try to make up for it because that will only make things 10x harder than they need to be.

Because that is where the real damage is done. Just accept what has happened and focus on hitting your deficit and chances are you would have undone most of it in a couple of days of dieting.